The story of a tiger queen

Panthera tigris tigris

ENDANGERED

Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve

The jungles of central India, dating back millions of years, are home to some of the most varied wildlife in India. From bears to boars, monkeys to mongoose, from the forest floor to the tree tops, from the smallest species to the largest, this is Kipling’s Jungle Book made flesh and blood and home to arguably the earth’s most beautiful killer - the Bengal Tiger. A solitary hunter that combines stealth and power to kill with a swipe of its paw or one bite of its powerful jaws and NOTHING quite prepares you for a tryst with a bengal tiger in the wild - neither Jim Corbett’s lilting colonial prose nor Disney’s brilliant films.

More often than not, tiger spotting is an exciting game of hide-and-seek with small clues sprinkled randomly all over the jungle – a strangely silent and deserted waterhole on a warm evening, a skittish sambar stomping his hoof for no obvious reason, a pugmark across a recent jeep track, a nervous langur peering at a lantana bush – all pushing the adrenaline as you await a climactic encounter with the apex predator of the jungle. It does not matter where and how it happens, the moment is always mesmeric. Something beautiful and primal stirs within our dulled urban souls and it is virtually impossible to be unmoved by the up, close and very personal experience of meeting almost 220 kilos of majesty and raw muscle.

Tiger authority extraordinaire Valmik Thapar says tigers have always "captured the human imagination" and "from the beginning of civilisation,they [tigers] have been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalised in art and poetry...” As William Blake – who at best probably just managed to spot a gambolling tiger cub at London Zoo – gushed in his 1794 illustrated poem contemplating and immortalising this beast, "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" 

This was the stage set for us amidst the stunningly beautiful gold and green meadows of Tadoba, home to a rich menagerie of denizens that make up the tiger’s world and, often, its unwitting buffet. Here, in the Jamni grasslands, we had run into Choti Tara, queen of all we could see, the previous day. The irony of nicknames extends even to tigers, “Choti Tara“ or the Little One, named after her mother Tara, is the longest and tallest tiger in Tadoba. Born in 2009, she has been a steady presence in the meadows of Jamni. Easily identified by the blister on her nose and the GPS collar around her neck, one is likely to meet her rounding a bend near Jamni village, so this is where we headed hoping for another tryst with destiny - a classic example of hope trumping rationale.

Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve

Tadoba Lake & the Jamni village meadows

Once again we took the Moharli gate, the oldest entrance to the park, and made our way towards the village and its surrounding meadows in the hope of seeing the queen of Jamni in her element. What we did not know at the time was the surprise that lay in wait for us in those beautiful gold and green meadows. But before we got there Tadoba had some more surprises planned for us along the way, just to spice things up a bit. Smart tiger conservation practices have made Taboda a modern miracle in central India. It has tigers coming out of its ears to the extent that there are more of them spilling over to the buffer zone than there are, within the park boundary. The Moharli zone, all 180 kilometers, is home to 11 tigers – two adult males – Matkasur and Bajrang and tigresses Maya, Choti Tara and her cubs, Sonam and her litter of four cubs. And the diversity of habitat and abundance of water bodies make Tadoba one of the finest birding destinations in Maharashtra. The dense mixed forest zone, bamboo, short grasslands and wetlands and the perennial River Andhari make it perfect for all varieties of animals. They all came out to add color to our trip - some danced, some gave us the look and some chirped - a veritable amphitheater of symphonies.

Soon after entering from the Moharli gate one enters the realm of some of the main protagonists of Tadoba and a kingdom of warfare - the Telia Lake region. Here some of the bloodiest battles were fought for dominance of the lush lands rich with prey and graceful ladies. We start with Madhuri who, in 2010, delivered her first litter with Broken Tail (Yeda Anna). This litter did not survive and were killed by the huge Wagdoh male who defeated Yeda Anna. Wagdoh then sired Madhuri’s second litter, Sonam, Lara, Geeta & Mona, the Telia Sisters - made famous by a documentary on their growing up aired by the Discovery Channel on 20 September, 2014 as “Tigress Blood” and also telecast on Indian television in early 2015 as “Tiger Sisters of Telia“ capturing the extraordinary behaviour of these four tiger sisters entrenched around the Telia Lake and their unique adaptation to survive. This was a coming-of-age story, filmed over two years, of sisters who battled each other for dominance over their homeland. Once the girls grew older and stronger, instinct kicked in and they had to separate and compete to take their mother’s place for control of Telia Lake. Their bond was broken and the family torn apart. To survive independently, each sister had to make one large kill every week – and alone, they each struggled. Desperate and starved, the four siblings made a startling choice — to form an alliance. They joined forces to hunt as a pack, fearless and unstoppable, and take on dangerous prey, culminating in a never-before-filmed hunt of a tiger family taking down a sloth bear and forever changing the rules of tiger behaviour.

Of the four Sonam was the most aggressive and dominant. She later chased away her three sisters and mother Madhuri and ruled around the Telia lake. She delivered her first litter too and as we listened to this extraordinary tale in awe, one of her cubs emerged from the dense bamboo forests. The jungle came alive with calls from the Bandar-Log and the herds of deer as the cub went into a nearby waterhole to drink.

This was Sonam's cub who came out from a bamboo grove and gave us a glimpse into a tigers life. After spending some time cooling off in the water hole it got up and leisurely sauntered up to a stand of trees to the remains of a gaur the entire family had killed a day or two back. This was a beginning of a beautiful sequence. The cub majestically stepped out of the waterhole, padded up to the kill and had some helpings before finally deciding to walk off into the inscrutable shadows of the bamboo on the far side. The gaur kill was abandoned in all probability as we could see the bare bones. It must have been a spectacular hunt given that a gaur weighs between 800 to a 1000 kilos.

After this mesmerizing interlude with Sonam’s cub we got back on our way to the Jamni grasslands and spent some time eating dust tracking a predator that didn’t want to show up or so we thought. Some passing safari vehicles, the sturdy gypsies, gave us word that Choti Tara’s cubs were sitting in the shade of a tree on the far side of the meadow but they had been unable to spot them. Pedal to the metal it was and, thankfully for us, 2017 in the Jamni area had been a celebration for tiger enthusiasts. Choti Tara and her, I think at the time, 11 month old unnamed cubs were quite often seen coming around the bend near Jamni village and this time we knew they were in the area and it was just a question of spotting them.

When we first saw this beautiful family, it was the cubs we spotted first in the tall grass under a tree on the far side of the meadow and the untrained eye could be easily forgiven for mistaking the cubs to be adult tigers as they were quite large. The cubs were extremely well camouflaged and it took us quite a while to actually spot them. Our sharp eyed naturalist told us only the cubs were there and they were waiting for Choti Tara to come and the best we could do was find a good spot and wait. So that is exactly what we did.

The arrival of a tiger, it’s true, is often preceded by moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Bird calls darken. small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emerging group consciousness of an escape route. A kind of shiver seems to run through everything, a low hum that sounds — literally, in the whispered Hindi conversation of the guides — like tiger, tiger, tiger. This zone of apprehension follows the tiger as it moves. Often, the best way to find a tiger is to switch off your engine and listen. You might then hear, from a distance, the subtle changes in pitch and cadence that indicate a boundary of the zone. But even then, it is impossible to predict where, or if, the tiger will appear.

This time, it did appear and it was from behind us!

We were parked on the edge of the track, looking down. For several minutes before Choti Tara showed herself, unease warped through the meadow. An unidentifiable impulse made the human occupants of the jeeps on the track stand on their seats, gripping their cameras, phones and binoculars with both hands. Some langur that had been prancing on the branches quietened and slunk away in silence. And it was very strange: Because the tiger had been, so long as she was invisible, a hazard of pure atmosphere, a permeating energy that filled the whole jungle with dread, when she walked out into the open, she seemed curiously aloof and indifferent. She had not come to justify the myth we were writing for her. She was not interested in the mood she created or in the sounds her audience made. She had come for her cubs, there they were in the shadows, and she made her way to them past us; that was as far as her participation went. And when I made this photo she was but a few feet away.

She went by without paying us any attention and made a beeline for her cubs. And then very gracefully, cubs in tow, she disappeared where the long grass blows.

What Kipling wrote in the Jungle Book was fiction, this story, however, is fact and it’s a story that has continued unbroken for thousands of years every bit as miraculous and inspired.

I can tell you now, reader, that experiencing the grandeur of a tiger in the wild is mesmerising. Time slows down, her colours seemed to ignite in the light, a combustible mix of ember-orange and gunpowder-black. Her mighty limbs descend in complete silence as she pads through these jungles where the witch-light of the shadows can unman you. The trees here, Triassic-tall, loom over everything, silent and brooding in their leafy reverie. Pools of shadow form under these trees and fevered eyes, glazed with hunger, lurk in the carnal-black darkness. I have seen webs which shimmered like stars on a new moon night catching man and beast unawares. And all the while, an amphitheatre of sounds follows you through the jungle. You have never heard such a maddening cocktail of whoops, squawks, screeches and wails and they all tell of the coming of the tiger.

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